Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what's really going on to be scared.
P. J. Plauger
If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
Alan J. Perlis
Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.
Bill Gates
Theory is when you know something, but it doesn't work. Practice is when something works, but you don't know why. Programmers combine theory and practice: Nothing works and they don't know why.
Anonymous
It's OK to figure out murder mysteries, but you shouldn't need to figure out code. You should be able to read it.
Steve McConnell
Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.
Alan J. Perlis
If we believe in data structures, we must believe in independent (hence simultaneous) processing. For why else would we collect items within a structure? Why do we tolerate languages that give us the one without the other?
Alan J. Perlis
I get as much enjoyment from trashing code as I do from scratching it out in the first place!
Anonymous
An adequate bootstrap is a contradiction in terms.
Alan J. Perlis
Get into a rut early: Do the same process the same way. Accumulate idioms. Standardize. The only difference(!) between Shakespeare and you was the size of his idiom list - not the size of his vocabulary.
Alan J. Perlis